


The Next World

by sanguinity



Series: sang's moreholmes [17]
Category: 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 1990s, Background Unrequited Holmes/Watson, Baghdad by the Bay, Culture Shock, Gen, HIV/AIDS, San Francisco, Tardigrades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-09-05 11:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16809379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: A scant month into the twentieth century, Sherlock Holmes is considering chucking it all in for a second long sleep, until a conversation with Winslow and an appeal from royalty change his mind.





	The Next World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/gifts).



> Thanks to language-escapes for believing in this story and talking me down when I was ready to chuck it, to grrlpup for taking my prose of two years ago and bringing it up to standard, and to colebaltblue for San Francisco-picking and enthusiasm.
> 
> Thanks also to Phoenixfalls, for co-signing all my 1994 Baker Street ideas two years ago, and for renewing her prompt for long enough that I actually finished the thing.

> It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.  
>  — Oscar Wilde, 1891

San Francisco embraced Sherlock Holmes like a native son. 

To be fair, nativity had never been a requirement to be beloved in San Francisco. How was it that Conan Doyle described London? _That great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained._ I myself would never call San Francisco a cesspool — although plenty have, from Dirty Harry to Ronald Reagan — but for well over a century now the world's fruits and nuts have been rolling this way and collecting here. Ever since the reign of Joshua Norton, Emperor of San Francisco and the Protector of Mexico, a man beloved by San Franciscans decades before the world had even heard of Sherlock Holmes, the only requirement to being embraced by this town is to put on a good show.

And Sherlock Holmes did. I don’t think he realized at first how ubiquitous Conan Doyle’s legacy had become during his long sleep, nor the notoriety that would result when he claimed his own name. But claim it he did, and the city was fascinated with him — more fascinated, I think, than if he’d been able to prove his identity. This upstart pretender to Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker was an enigma and a natural showman, mysterious in his origins and unapologetically flamboyant. His apparent “performance” of Sherlock Holmes could not be shaken, no matter what someone threw at him, and his “real” identity could not be discovered, no matter who did the investigating. Right out of the gate, he was destined to become a much-beloved local character.

On top of it all, the man solved crimes! Dirty Harry had always been an outsider's fantasy, a brutal, no-nonsense cop determined to clean up our dirty, hippy, depraved, drug-crazed city and make it safe for real Americans. But this Sherlock Holmes was clearly one of our own: only a few sequins short of a revue act, nutty enough to claim the Inverness of the Great Detective himself, and possessing a heartfelt love of, as Conan Doyle put it, “all that is bizarre and outside the humdrum conventions of everyday life.” Forget about cleaning up San Francisco’s streets to make them safe for Lyndon LaRouche’s California; Holmes burst onto the scene by foiling a man-eating tiger, and then saved Steve Young from a kidnapping plot masterminded by a fraudulent Sourdough Sam. Sherlock Holmes’ approach to fighting crime was kooky enough to make San Francisco even more quintessentially San Francisco.

The city adored him for it. 

Would that Holmes was as content with San Francisco. He seemed to go by turns, one moment enjoying the quirks of the city, the next chafing under San Franciscans' expectations of him.

“What’s this about a _jellyfish?”_ Holmes thundered, bursting in the door late one evening, the day after the conclusion of the 49ers case.

“A what?” I asked, although I knew that particular tone. I put a marker in my book and went to the bookshelf; I’d have no peace until this was settled.

“Was it Watson who saddled me with hand-to-hand combat with a jellyfish, or was that one of those poxy fellows who came after him?” 

Holmes was ignorant of most of Watson's stories, having gone to sleep before most of them were published. I, on the other hand, spent the first few days after Holmes' arrival blowing through all sixty original stories, searching for insight into dealing with this aggravating, demanding, and extraordinary man who had moved into my home. Since finishing the Conan Doyle stories, I had moved on to stories by other authors — or _pastiches,_ as they're called by the Sherlock Holmes fanclubs across the country. I had barely begun exploring the wild and woolly world of pastiche in those days, but once one was aware of them, one almost couldn't help tripping over them. Unfortunately, reading so many Sherlock Holmes stories so quickly meant that they had a tendency to run together. 

“The jellyfish was Conan Doyle’s, I think,” I said, pulling down one volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, and then another.

“Watson's,” Holmes corrected me. “Not Conan Doyle's. By the time I went to sleep, that Irishman already regretted having ever written about me. Everything that came after was Watson having his little revenge.”

“Revenge?” It seemed a strong word. Holmes didn’t answer, and I turned back to my volume. “Anyway, I thought I read somewhere that Conan Doyle was Scots?”

“Irish! Scots! I’m sure I don’t care.”

But by then I had found the story. “Here it is, one of Dr. Watson’s! And I don’t think it was hand-to-hand so much as…” I paged to the end. “Ah, yes, you killed the jellyfish with a rock.”

“A _rock,”_ he said in disbelief. “Next he’s going to write me as a Neolithic man, completely devoid of logical faculties, grunting and clothed in animal skins.”

Holmes did that sometimes, spoke of Watson as if he were still living and writing stories, forgetting that the man had died decades before I was born. Holmes cleared his throat, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the error. 

I went back to the beginning of the story. “I stand corrected, Dr. Watson didn’t write this one.” I smiled sweetly and handed _The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes_ across to him. “You did.”

 _“I_ did?” He took the book and read the first few lines in consternation. Then he read aloud, “‘At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. Ah! _had he but been with me—!’_ When was this published? 1926! Look at that, a quarter century, and the man still could not let it go!”

“Let what go?”

“1899 wasn’t my first attempt at a long sleep. My first effort was in 1895, when it had become clear that I would never again have a worthy adversary. I chose a quiet place, deep enough in the Yorkshire countryside that I should have been undisturbed, but Watson tracked me down and pulled me out of my cooling chamber by my ear. He would not stop harping on it, said it was suicide—”

“He's not wrong,” I said.

“Is a suicide guaranteed an afterlife?” he shot back. I made a face: Holmes’ successful resuscitation had been anything but guaranteed. But Holmes ignored me, continuing his rant about Dr. Watson. “He kept saying I was deserting ‘my friends who loved me.’ By which he meant him, of course."

“So you two _were_ gay.” I had wondered, reading the stories.

“Dr. Watson was a generally sanguine person, yes,” Holmes said, not missing a beat. “Although ‘gay’ was somewhat overstating the case. I, however, have always been given to fits of melancholia.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh please, you can drop the man-out-of-time shtick. You’re not nearly so confused by the 1990s as you pretend. Not since your second or third day here, anyway.”

He considered me a long moment, then raised an eyebrow. “Your evidence?”

“Oh, come on! Sherlock Holmes, the master of observation? I told you the first day that ‘Big Willy’ is a personal joke, yet you insist on using it with random people as if you don’t know any better. And you can’t convince me that you struggle with contemporary slang as much as you make out. You wouldn’t be nearly so effective with disguises if you couldn’t get the speech right, too. And your puns are clear indicators of how much you’ve picked up on, and how fast. You play innocent about them, but you haven’t been lucking into them, not at that rate, and you can’t set them up without knowing the cultural referents.”

He had that small, pleased smile he sometimes got. “Is that so?”

“It is. So there’s no way you’re going to convince me that you’ve been in San Francisco for weeks and still have no idea what ‘gay’ means. You pull that act to get people to underestimate you, or to hide what you genuinely don’t know. Or, sometimes, to distract people!” I had the bit between my teeth now. “So. Were you and Dr. Watson gay?”

His smile revealed nothing. “Watson would be mortally offended by your suggestion that his regard for me was founded on such debased and perverted interests.” 

“Being gay is not—” I protested, but he interrupted me by shutting the book with a snap.

“And you are absolutely correct. I am better-versed in the cultural idiom of the 1990s than I let on. Which is how I know, my dear Winslow, that not only is your question exceedingly impolite for the 1890s, it is impolite for the 1990s as well.” 

With a flourish, he handed the _Case-Book_ back to me and swept from the room.

He was right, of course: even here in San Francisco, it was rude to ask someone point-blank without some kind of invitation. But Holmes was so abrasive himself, so willing to dissect and flay someone's personal life for all to see, that it hadn't occurred to me that he had things that he was private about. For all his brilliance he was as human as the rest of us; it was easy to forget.

San Francisco loved Sherlock Holmes, as I said before, but only as a performer and entertainer; much to his frustration, San Franciscans didn't flock to our door with interesting crimes for him to solve.

Three weeks passed after the end of the 49ers problem, and in that time Holmes did not have one significant case. The SFPD seemed determined to keep Holmes at arm's length, scapegoating him for the media's tendency to portray them as lackluster bumblers. Holmes' attempts to consult for the agents at the local FBI field office fared no better: they took his reports with the polite distance that they showed all citizen tipsters. Even the _Thrifty Nickel_ disappointed his hopes — he had brandished the paper at me with unrestrained glee when he had first discovered it. "Look, Winslow! An entire paper composed of nothing but personal advertisements! You would be astonished what uses criminals make of these!" But even Holmes failed to wring a significant case from its pages.

I hoped that catching up on a century of science and history would keep him occupied until his consulting career took off again, but it was the science-fiction novels proliferating through the house that consumed his attention. My Blockbuster card took up permanent residence in his pocketbook as he haunted their aisles, steadily working his way through their futuristic offerings. He bartered with Usenet fans for back episodes of _Next Gen_ and _Deep Space Nine,_ and soon the stack of _Star Trek_ tapes next to the TV loomed higher than the stacks of _Cops_ and _America's Most Wanted._

I wanted to believe the profusion of science fiction was simple culture shock — who wouldn't need a little escapism after jumping half a world and most of a century? _Blade Runner_ and _Robo-Cop_ were nearly on-brand for him! Still— his one-way trip to the twentieth century had begun with an interest in H.G. Wells. But I was determined to ride out his malaise: after all, he could have been buying cocaine off the street to drug his way out of boredom. How much harm could a little science fiction do?

But then came the morning he greeted me with an issue of _Biochemistry,_ asking for help in deciphering a scientific paper on the cryptobiotic sugars and radiodurant proteins of the common tardigrade. He was bloodshot from lack of sleep, wide-awake and disheveled, and I wondered how many cans of Jolt, his over-the-counter-stimulant of choice now that cocaine was no longer readily available, were fuelling his mania. His energy made my tiny kitchen, already busy with Mrs. Hudson's breakfast preparations and Lucie's snuffling for dropped tidbits, seem even smaller.

"Forget the arctic blackfish!" Holmes crowed, dashing my hopes that he was simply expanding his well-documented passion for chemistry into the new and highly productive field of biochemistry. "Not only can this little creature withstand decades of dehydration and freezing temperatures, it can survive ridiculous doses of ionizing radiation! Nuclear fallout, Winslow! This is going to be the key!"

I surveyed the page in dismay. I had thought that the scientific journals I brought home would be a distraction from his obsession with the future — a way of preparing for a renewed career as a consulting detective while he slowly rebuilt his network of professional contacts — but it seemed they had only been incorporated into his obsession.

"Holmes. Please tell me you're not researching another long sleep." And not only another long sleep, it looked like, but how to survive a Skynet-induced armageddon.

He made a frustrated noise and nearly vibrated in his intensity. "There's no _crime_ anymore, Winslow!"

I grabbed his elbow and dragged him out of the tiny kitchen into the front room, where we wouldn't be under Mrs. Hudson's feet. She cast me a grateful look as we went. 

"You barely survived your first trip through time. You can't possibly have exhausted the wonders of the twentieth century already!" 

"Do you know how low the contemporary murder rate is, Winslow? It's preposterous!"

I mustered all my reserves of patience. "Perhaps you just need a bigger city. Surely it doesn't matter how low the murder rate is, as long as you have enough people to multiply it by. San Francisco is world-class, but let's face it, we're tiny." As much as I would hate to see him go — and in point of fact, I would miss him considerably — I didn't understand why he was still here. There was no part of me that believed that back in 1899, San Francisco had been anything but a conveniently remote location, someplace too far away for Henry Moriarty or Dr. Watson to find him and foil his plans. "If you want to go back to London, I could take a sabbatical from the clinic. Help get you set up again. I don't know London, but I do know the twentieth century. Surely I could help." God only knew what I'd do about my med school loans, but I'd figure out something.

"London is closed to me. I have no surviving identity documents, and no one in England to vouch for me. I tried to acquire travel documents when I first arrived, but the Consulate laughed me out of their doors."

"False documents, then?" Two weeks ago I would never have suggested such a thing, but he would run into the issue of a legal identity sooner or later; some kind of forgery might eventually become a necessity.

He shook his head. "Requires capital, either social or metallic, and I have neither at the moment. But the twenty-second century, Winslow! The twentieth century is not as different from the nineteenth as I hoped, and yet the twentieth-century advances in medicine and science — biochemistry! space research! extremophiles! — should be enough to bring the twenty- _second_ century within my reach. Especially if I have your help!"

"My help!?"

"Medical training is far more extensive now than it was in my day—"

"I’m a surgeon, Holmes! I spent twelve years training to be a _surgeon,_ not a biochemist! And even if I had talent in developing pharmaceuticals, which I don't, I wouldn't be wasting it on _this!_ There are more important problems in the world!"

"More important than immortality, Winslow?" He gave me an arch look.

"Immortality!? Flitting from century to century isn't immortality, it's _tourism!_ It's wasting your life on things that don't matter! What good can you possibly do in the world when you're always playing catch-up? I've read the books, it took you _years_ to establish a consulting practice back in London—"

"Because I didn't know my profession!"

"Because you had no network of contacts! No people who trusted you with their problems! And 'knowing your profession' is as much knowing the contemporary context as anything else!" I took a deep breath. "You have to be patient and give this time. If you can't make it here in the twentieth century, what on earth makes you think you have anything to offer to the twenty- _second_ century? At least here you have a chance to be of use!"

"I can't be of use when there are no _cases,_ Winslow!"

"How do you know? You haven't looked at your mail in a week!" I strode to the mantlepiece and the growing stack of letters that he had let accumulate, and snatched them up.

"Lunatics and requests to entertain at children's birthday parties!" 

"Well, maybe the children have a mystery that needs solving that they don't know about! Maybe their parents do! How will you know if you don't get out of the house?" I pressed the stack of mail against his chest as though serving him a court summons; his hand came up to grab it just before I let go. I took a deep breath. Again. "Look, I need to get to the clinic. Just… read your mail. Don't give up on us already when you've barely even started."

I had little hope that a personal appeal from me could keep him from gambling his life on another long sleep, not when even Dr. Watson, a dear and lifelong friend, had been unpersuasive. But I was too incensed at what he was throwing away to stand there and look at him any more. "Mrs. Hudson!" I called, taking up my coat. "Don't bother with breakfast for me. I'll grab something on the way in."

"But it's just ready, Dr. Winslow!" she said, coming to the doorway.

I shook my head. "I'm sorry, I need to go." I fixed a glare on Holmes. "Read your mail!" I hissed at him, and left.

"Now look what you've done…!" I heard Mrs. Hudson scolding Holmes as I started down the porch steps. "With your water-bears and your cooling chambers!" 

I didn't hear his response — I was already at the curb, by then — but I wished her more luck than I’d had.

I cooled down by the time I made it to the clinic, which was as well for my young patients, who deserved my best. By the time I parked my car and went inside, I even felt bad about going off on Holmes like that. Back in 1899, he might have thought himself done with gas-lamps and hansom cabs, done with Mycroft and Dr. Watson and his own Mrs. Hudson, but surely, now that he was here, there must be moments of regret, moments when the marvels of the late twentieth century didn't seem worth the exchange. The twenty-second century might seem a better bargain for all that he had left behind. But the thought of Holmes climbing into another cryogenics chamber, even one with up-to-the-minute engineering, with a new and unproven pharmaceutical cocktail in his veins... It chilled me. All my medical instincts and training said that it was only dumb luck that he had survived decanting the first time. If I hadn't been there, he would have died. Anything might go wrong if he were to risk it a second time.

But I couldn't bully him into staying here in the twentieth century, either; he was a grown man, liable to his own conscience and will, and however foolish I thought his reasoning, I had no right to gainsay it short of placing him under a psychiatric hold. And as mad as I thought he was for considering another long sleep, I couldn’t say in all professional honesty that he deliberately intended to harm himself. 

By lunch time I was rueful about getting so upset over a single journal article — what was one journal article, after all, when it would take months or years to prepare for another centuries-long sleep? Anything might happen in that time. I spent part of my lunch hour procuring a pair of Midori tickets as a peace offering. I knew little about classical music, but what I had read in the _Chronicle_ suggested that her violin might satisfy even Holmes' discerning ear.

And perhaps introducing him to more of what was beautiful about the twentieth century would prove an enticement to stay put a little while longer.

Unfortunately, my peace offering was quickly forgotten when I came home to find the house reeking of tobacco smoke. I tracked the offending odor to Holmes' study, where I found him chain-smoking, the room thick with smoke. After his first week in my home, Holmes had been punctiliously courteous about not smoking in the house, but I admit to not having the makings of a sleuth: I didn't stop to ask myself what had changed today. Instead, I just blew my stack at him. Again.

“We have _talked_ about this!” I scolded as I threw open windows. Lucie milled excitedly at my feet. “This is _my_ house, not yours! Times have changed, and even if you want to risk your own health, I’m not about to put up with the second-hand smoke, not for me, and not for Mrs. Hudson either! Not to mention that your smoking is a terrible influence on those kids you run around with! My god, Holmes, I should drag you down to the hospital and introduce you to the emphysema and tracheotomy patients!”

“Thank you for the kind offer, Winslow," he said drily, "but I’ve had quite enough of hospitals today.” He dragged a dirty tea-cup nearer to him and knocked the still-smouldering contents of his pipe into it. There was a fine tremor in his hands from the nicotine, and perhaps the Jolt before that. 

"We _drink_ out of that," I complained, even as I was relieved to see him extinguish his pipe.

“Times haven’t changed so much,” he observed, as he scraped at the bottom of the pipe-bowl with a pen-knife. “You sound exactly like Watson going on about my cocaine.”

“Oh, my god, if you even _think_ about shooting up—” I threatened, my temper and worry flaring again, but he reached for his tobacco slipper — of all the things to bring across half the world and a hundred years! — and began re-packing his pipe. “Oh, no, you don’t!” I said, distracted from the worse danger by the more imminent one. “Out, out, _out_ if you're going to do that” He showed no sign of moving, so I grabbed his elbow, dragged him from his chair, and propelled him out the door. _“Outside!”_ I shouted after him.

Mulishly, he went.

My temper runs hot and fast, but fortunately it cools just as quickly — Holmes and I could never have gotten along otherwise. And we did mostly get along — the man was aggravating in his arrogance and Victorian assumptions, but he did revise his opinions when confronted with solid logic, and his arrogance tended more toward thoughtlessness than out-and-out disregard for another’s feelings. To my never-ending frustration, Mrs. Hudson tended to give him a free pass on the thoughtlessness — in my opinion, men too often got a free pass on that, in my generation just as much as hers — but when I called him on it he usually adjusted his behavior somewhat. He was a far cry from a model roommate, but I’d had worse, and there were rewarding elements of living with him. It helped, I think, that I didn’t simmer with resentment: I blew my stack, gave him an earful, let him shout back if he thought I was being unreasonable, and twenty minutes later we’d both have put it behind us, him telling me about whatever hare-brained thing he’d gotten up to that day and inviting me to come along as his accomplice for phase two. 

So it was in perfect confidence that all was right between us that I went out to the porch to let him know Mrs. Hudson had dinner ready— only to find he wasn’t there. That in itself wasn’t too surprising; he sometimes got distracted by doings in the park across the street. However, he tended to leave his smoking paraphernalia behind when he wandered. Tonight his tobacco slipper was not on the porch swing, nor his Zippo. Being neither his girlfriend nor his mother, I went back in and told Mrs. Hudson it'd be just us for dinner — he'd turn up eventually, and Mrs. Hudson would keep something warm for him. But when dark fell and he still hadn't returned, I went looking. 

I found him at Pier Seven, on his customary brooding bench. He was sitting smoking, staring out at the lights of the Bay Bridge. His tobacco slipper lay flat and empty beside him, next to a half-empty pack of cigarettes.

“The fresh air is rather counter to purposes, Winslow,” he said when he heard my step. “But I imagine Watson would have approved, at least. He was always a believer in fresh air.”

I took a seat at the other end of the bench, and looked out at the same dark horizon. “I wasn’t throwing you out of the house, you know,” I said, to get it out of the way. He shrugged; he hadn’t thought I was.

"Nearly a hundred years asleep, Winslow, and like a fool, the first thing I do upon waking is to put away Moriarty's heir. And now what? It's 1895 all over again. I tell you, I have half a mind to go break Moriarty back out of prison."

I smiled to myself. “Now that’s an image. I’m almost sorry they shut down Alcatraz.” We were looking at Treasure Island, the site of the old World's Fair, but there were plenty of benches farther around the Embarcadero that commanded a view of Alcatraz. “Strike that, it's a lucky break they shut down Alcatraz. Knowing he was there on that island would torment you almost as much as the city lights tormented them.” 

He made a derisive noise, but didn't disagree.

We sat there, watching the lights together. “So what's this about a hospital?” I asked, thinking of his earlier comment about having had enough of hospitals today. It wasn't our fight that had driven him out, I was sure of that much, and I had started thinking like a detective again. A detective's assistant, in any case.

“A patient request for my attendance. He was too ill to come to me.”

"A case?" I asked, although it couldn't possibly have been; he wouldn't be brooding if he had a case.

“I hoped so. Foul play, perhaps, or a deathbed confession.” He took another long draw on his cigarette. "No confession, as it turned out. He simply wished to meet the great Sherlock Holmes."

"Make-a-Wish." At his inquiring glance, I clarified, "It's a charity I work with sometimes at the clinic. They grant dying children one last big wish. Getting to meet a personal hero is pretty common."

"Michael Jacobs wasn't a child. Although he was still shockingly young."

I winced. There was more than one reason to die young in San Francisco — there was more than one reason to die young anywhere, as I well knew, working with children as I did. And yet... "What hospital?"

"San Francisco General." Holmes enunciated every syllable, knowing full well what I was driving at. After all, he had been in town over a month, and he read all the papers. He could not possibly have missed _The Bay Area Reporter's_ pages of obituaries every week.

"Ward 5B," I sighed, thinking of Dan. 

"5A," he corrected me. I nodded. It was not a surprise that the AIDS unit had grown to need a bigger space since my time there. “It seems I was Michael Jacobs’ boyhood hero.”

I blew out a long breath. "I'm sorry," I offered.

He dismissed my sympathy with a shrug. "You should feel sorrier for Mr. Jacobs. I am a man of reason, Winslow. I’m not well-suited to providing solace. I'm no priest, no comforter.”

“Dr. Watson thought you were.” I had been struck by how Watson's stories had portrayed, time and again, a man with a large heart. It had carried me through some of the more exasperating times with him, those first weeks.

Holmes lifted an eyebrow at me in query. 

“The one about a woman whose face was eaten by a lion?” I prompted. I didn't expect him to know it, but I thought a good rant about Watson's stories might lift his mood.

He stared at me in open disbelief. "A _lion,"_ he said, taking the bait.

"She was a domestic violence victim, if I'm remembering it right. Of course there were no divorce laws then, no DV shelters—"

"You can hardly expect me to believe it's any better now," he scoffed, "if Mrs. Bobbitt's case is indicative."

The comparison startled a laugh from me. "Okay, granted. She was an 1890s Lorena Bobbitt. Except she didn't bother with a knife and set a lion on him instead."

"Ambitious," he commented drily.

"It went badly," I conceded. "But she wanted to confess to you before she died. By the end of the story, you’d talked her out of suicide.”

He stubbed his cigarette stub out on the bench. “Watson always did do me too much credit. You do realize none of this ever happened.”

"Well, yes. But still, Watson thought you capable of—"

"Watson and Conan Doyle were writing _popular stories,"_ he snapped. "Writing what they thought would sell. I was nothing more than a memory and a meal ticket by the time that was written."

"So what happened?"

“With the lion-eaten woman? I just told you, it never happened.”

“No, today. With Michael Jacobs.”

He made an aggravated sound. “What could I do? He wanted to meet Sherlock Holmes. He met Sherlock Holmes. Much good it did him.”

“Did he think it was actually you? Or did he think you were an impersonator?”

"I am informed that the real Sherlock Holmes' hair stayed dark until at least 1914. Mr. Jacobs could barely see me, and yet he could see _this._ " He touched his salt-and-pepper curls, as if his vanity had been stung. 

I sighed. There was supposed to be a drug now for the cytomegalovirus, the cause of AIDS-related blindness. But every drug that was supposed to be useful, either against HIV itself or its related pathologies, had proved disappointing: too expensive, too toxic, too limited in its effect, too constrained in its indications… Any of the above might have applied to Michael Jacobs.

"There's hair dye if it really bothers you all that much."

He glanced at me; perhaps my tone had been sharper than I had intended. "It would have made no difference. I couldn't answer his rather pointed questions about something called 'The Dying Detective.' It rather strained the illusion that I was _that_ Sherlock Holmes." 

"The Dying Detective—" I began, marshalling an explanation, but he waved me off.

"It was clear enough from context. And what could I say? In that room, with him and his… friend. It was indefensible. I'm sure Watson thought so at the time. 

"If someone had said to me — if _you_ had said to me, Winslow, that day I first woke up, that there was a plague in this city killing fifteen hundred people a year, I would have thought it a commonplace. Diptheria was killing as many when I left London, and getting steadily worse."

"We vaccinate for diptheria now," I said.

"Precisely. Diptheria is no longer a problem. I imagine cholera isn't, either."

"Well, not in London, anyway. Or San Francisco. It's a money and infrastructure issue, mostly." Most of my own work in Panama had been surgical, but the cholera outbreak after the U.S. invasion had killed more than bullets had. 

"And the same if you had told me that this plague was killing so many young men: I would have called it a commonplace. A tragedy, yes, but tragedy _is_ commonplace, Winslow. Or it used to be. I look around this city, at its cleanliness, its wealth, the people's health and vibrancy… Poverty is hardly an issue nowadays."

"I wouldn't say that," I protested. "Deinstitutionalization sent homelessness through the roof."

"And that it would even occur to you to characterize _this—"_ He gestured at the empty benches along the length of the pier, as if anyone would choose to sleep over the water when there were warmer spots elsewhere in the city, "—as 'through the roof,' proves my point. Look at this city! There shouldn't be a plague here! There shouldn't be men — _young_ men! — dying in these numbers. This is a _crime,_ Winslow, as great a crime as I have ever witnessed. And yet I am useless, because contrary to the newspaper reports, I do not fight _crime._ I have never fought crime! My talents lie exclusively in uncovering what is secret and undetected! But this, _this_ is happening in plain sight. It is in the newspapers every week for anyone to read, and yet for all the good that does, it might as well be secret."

I couldn't disagree with him. It was difficult to believe that there was some shadowy, criminal conspiracy at the NIH and FDA, not when the neglect was public, happening right out in the open, apparent to anyone who cared to know about it. And yet it continued, fuelled and endorsed by the rhetoric of criminally uncompassionate men like Helms, Falwell, and LaRouche, while the public shrugged and turned away. All because the victims didn't meet their definition of _innocent._

"And you attend to children," Holmes said into the silence.

That stung. Dan had never said as much to my face, but as his friends had died, my inadequacy became blatantly clear. Not just his friends, either, but his partners, both of them. First Barry, back when my medical degree was brand-new and shiny, then Javier a few years later, not too long after I came back from Panama. And Dan himself, of course, not two months after Javier's passing. I was simply the wrong kind of doctor, a surgeon in trauma and pediatrics, useless for anything more than applying collegial pressure to the staff at SFGH. I could do little more than interpret medicalese and leverage small crannies in the system. It wasn’t much, let alone enough.

"Children die of AIDS, too, you know," I said, although it was closer to an indictment than a defense. The epidemic was iatrogenic as much as it was natural, after all. Children who acquired the virus tended to do so because of doctors: clotting factors for hemophiliacs. _Surgery._

"Winslow," Holmes said.

"Don't think it isn't something I haven't thought a million times myself. I already told you: if I had a talent for drug research, I wouldn't be wasting it on your escapism."

He winced.

He took up the pack from the bench and shook out another cigarette for himself. I stared out at the water and refused to give him the satisfaction of complaining about it. There was the metallic ring of him flipping open the lighter's lid, the soft _shpp_ of the wheel. He cupped his hand around the light and bent his head over it; a few seconds later, the Zippo clicked closed.

"I never did have a talent for it," I said. "I didn't want to spend my life shut up in a research lab somewhere—"

"Because you're a woman of action," he said. "It's not at all surprising that you're a surgeon. You need to see your patients, make an immediate and decisive difference in their lives. You're very like Watson, in some ways. Distressingly American, of course. And, I must admit, disturbingly female—"

"Hey!" I glared at him. "I thought you'd gotten over that nonsense."

He held up what I'm sure he meant to be a placating hand, but I felt far from placated. "I'm not maligning your sex, Winslow, far from it. But looking at you, I can't help but believe that Providence is a bungler."

"That sure as hell sounds like maligning," I said.

"Bear with me. We've already established that Providence is good, that goes without further questioning—"

"Wait, when did we establish that?"

He looked at me curiously. "You told me you'd read the stories? In one of the early ones, as I recall, Conan Doyle quoted me verbatim in my deductions about roses. The beauty of a rose is unnecessary, an extra, and only goodness gives extras..." He trailed off and frowned at me. "What _is_ that queer expression, Winslow?"

I was wondering how to break the news to him. I strongly disliked poking at the tenets of anyone's faith; goodness knows, there was enough ugliness in the world. But a man as logical as he wouldn't thank me to let it slide. "You slept through some developments in evolutionary biology, I'm afraid. You're presuming roses are for humans. I think you'll find they're actually for bees."

"Bees," he sighed. Bees were a sore subject with him. He was afraid of them — not that he would admit to more than a "prudent caution" — and yet Watson had seen fit to make him a beekeeper, and the joke had run away with itself in the decades since. "Well, if we can no longer assume good intent, we must acknowledge the possibility that Providence is outright malicious." He took another long draw on his cigarette. 

"Why are we even presuming Providence exists?" 

He cast me a surprised glance. "The parallels between you and Watson are inescapable. Surely even you noticed? To me, who knew you both… It's uncanny, the likeness. And here we are, in a city and time so unlike my own that it could be termed a gay paradise. Except you're a woman. And it isn't a paradise, not at all."

I looked at him, and thought about the things he wasn't saying. "So you and Watson were gay, after all."

He snorted. "I told you once before: he would be offended at the suggestion."

"But you?"

He was silent a long while. "An invert, certainly. Here in San Francisco, in 1993...? I have very little in common with Michael Jacobs or his friends, and it seems the grossest kind of effrontery to claim that I do."

I thought of Dan, and Barry, and Javier, and all the others. The lights of the Bay Bridge gleamed in the dark.

"For all this talk of 'gay liberation,'" he continued after a piece, "I was shocked and grieved to learn that men do not touch anymore, do not express affection. This is not an era in which Watson and I could walk arm-in-arm down the street. It’s an era in which Watson would not _allow_ me to walk arm-in-arm with him. You and I could," he said, gesturing between us with his cigarette. "And yet here I am, still me, and however so much regard I have for you, and however much you remind me of Watson, I find I have no interest in walking arm-in-arm with you. If you'll forgive the sentiment."

"Well, you're smoking at the moment, so I wouldn't want to anyway," I said. 

He smiled at that. "Of course," he agreed. "So you see, I look at you, and see the hand of Destiny at work. And just as clearly, I see that Destiny is a bungler."

"You're assuming Destiny cares about your romantic life. It might be that Destiny, if it exists at all, cares about your work."

"I find that just as impossible to credit. Would you like to see what in my personal correspondence passes for a case?" He reached into his jacket and fished out an envelope. "Look at this! You can see why I hoped for a deathbed confession."

He handed the envelope to me. It was small, nearly square, of a size for personal correspondence; the cream paper had a nice weight to it. I slid the folded page free of the envelope and tilted it to the street light. There was an ornate, engraved letterhead; the text was handwritten in what might have been brown ink, although it was hard to tell in the light. A fountain-pen, I thought, although I was better with pathology slides than handwriting.

“Look at the signature,” he prompted me. 

I skimmed past the florid phrases to the signature at the bottom: _Her Royal Majesty, Dowager Empress de San Francisco, José I, the Widow Norton._

“Oh! That’s…!” I stopped, realizing how many cultural referents I would need to explain. “Okay, so Emperor Norton was—”

“I know who Norton was, Winslow. I did do my basic research when choosing a site for my long sleep. Norton had no legal authority, of course, but his proclamations calling for a bridge to Oakland were very popular, which is why I set up my cryochamber in Marin, instead of across the Bay _._ But Norton died years before I came to San Francisco. You surely don’t expect me to believe he has a still-living widow.”

“No, no, of course he doesn’t. But she’s not a crackpot, she’s a drag queen. ‘Widow Norton’ is her stage name. She’s a big deal in certain circles.” At his blank look, I clarified, “Uh, drag queen, a female impersonator.”

His eyebrows went up. “So your argument that this man is not a ‘crackpot’—” He over-enunciated the word, testing it on his tongue, “—is that he dresses in female clothing while he conducts his correspondence in the persona of the fictional widow of a man who’s been dead for over a century. I assume the maroon ink is also a hallmark of his sanity?”

“She,” I corrected him. “ _Her_ sanity. In their drag personas, it’s polite to call them ‘she.’ And you’re in no position to throw stones, _you_ dress in female drag, I’ve seen you. And not just female drag, some of your disguises would be considered high camp, nowadays. The priests, for example.” There were reasons that so many of Holmes’ ardent fans were ‘friends of Dorothy.’ 

“They are _disguises,_ Winslow, not ‘drag,’ and I don them for investigations.” 

I rolled my eyes. “And they don them for fun, and maybe to tweak people’s noses, what does it matter? Look, I know it must sound loony to you, but I had a friend who dated someone in the Imperial Court. It’s all overblown pageantry on top, sure, but it’s serious business underneath. They raise an awful lot of money for charity."

“‘Dowager Empress,’” he said sourly. “One would think you Americans regret your independence.”

I had read the letter by then. "Look, she wants you to look into the death of a friend! A baron at the Court. Maybe you should give her a chance, Holmes. Maybe it takes an impersonator to extend you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there's more and better design in this Providence of yours than you give it credit for."

"Or maybe she just wants me to participate in her pageantry. Half the city thinks I'm an impersonator, myself. " 

"Her pageantry raises money to help the poor souls in 5A," I reminded him. "And you do love your theater, you told me so yourself."

He smoked quietly, considering that. Then he snorted in discontent or amusement, it was hard to tell. "Did you know, Winslow, that I'm not even a _good_ impersonator? Apparently I don't look enough like Jeremy Brett. He plays me on PBS, I'm told. The definitive Sherlock Holmes!"

I wasn't familiar with Jeremy Brett, whoever he was: between med school, Panama, and a surgical career, it had been a long time since I had watched much TV. I was a loyal subscriber to KQED, but for NPR, not PBS. "I'm only familiar with Rathbone, I'm afraid. And some very silly movies from when I was in med school. You and Watson were mice in one of them," I added, hoping to tease him out of his mood.

That startled him into nearly a laugh. "Mice! That would amuse Watson."

The silence re-established itself.

"I dunno," I said. "Maybe you are right about me. Maybe Destiny _is_ a bungler."

He cast me a distressed look, as if only now realizing the things he had said. "Winslow, you shouldn't take my ruminations seriously—"

 _"Maybe,"_ I said, interrupting whatever backhanded attempt at an apology he was about to make. "Maybe _I_ was given the wrong _Sherlock Holmes."_

He blinked at me. "You wish to be partnered to a mouse?"

"I feel quite certain that I was destined to be the partner of a brilliant, insightful, forward-looking woman. Not some outdated, misogynistic throwback to the 1890s."

He stared at me a long moment, then laughed with more pleasure than I had seen in him all evening. "Quite right, Winslow," he said. "Quite right."

"I don't see why Destiny should be all about you," I said. It sounded more peevish than I meant it to, but it was true: why _should_ Destiny be all about him?

"You are very like Watson, sometimes," he said. "And please understand me, I mean that as a high compliment."

"I saw a movie once where Watson was the brilliant one. You, on the other hand… You were a bit ridiculous."

"I _am_ ridiculous. And Watson had his moments of brilliance. As do you. Never let anyone tell you any different."

I laughed. "I'm a surgeon, Holmes. We're not exactly known for our fragile egos. How do you think I've put up with you these past weeks?"

He smiled, took one last draught of his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the bench, in the exact place he had stubbed out the previous one. "Perhaps we should head back. We have an appointment with royalty tomorrow."

"We?"

"I am perfectly satisfied with your company, Winslow, if you will tolerate mine."

I grinned. "Well, seeing that I might have been stuck with a mouse, I think I'll manage to cope. Somehow."

"May I hitch a lift home on your mechanical steed?"

"I brought your helmet, just in case."

We walked back to my motorcycle together in companionable silence. I tossed him his helmet and mounted, and in a few moments he, too, was mounted behind me. He reeked of tobacco smoke — a scent I was coming to have strangely mixed feelings about — but the breeze of our going would disperse that. 

"Do you think it really will be a case, at the Imperial Court?" I asked. I was worrying about what he would do, should his hopes be dashed yet again tomorrow.

I felt his shrug through his hands on my waist. "Only one way to find out, Winslow. Although you've assured me that the good widow is not a pot which is cracked." I smiled at his deliberately mangling the word. "But I think I shall put away my water-bears for the moment in any case. Even if this little problem with Baron Mind proves a disappointment, you are correct that I've bearly explored the koalaties of the twentieth century."

I shook my head and kicked the starter. "That was grizzly, Holmes," I called over my shoulder, and felt him snug up close behind me as I eased away from the curb.


End file.
